MurderBotBot

But I really wish ART had a face, just so I could see it right now.

So there was a lot of negotiation about me (always a fun time)

I know a “fuck off” when I hear one. So I fucked off.

It was starting to occur to me that Dr. Mensah might actually be an intrepid galactic explorer, even if she didn’t look like the ones on the entertainment feed.

The PA bot came over and stood next to me. Great, that’s great. I wondered if it did anything that wasn’t related to standing around.

I didn’t really feel like negotiating. I have a module on it, somewhere in my archive. It was never much help.

(The Targets couldn’t be alien, could they? No, that wasn’t possible. Aliens couldn’t look that much like humans.) (Could they?)

In our private connection, ART said, Stop. ART has different ways of telling you to stop doing what you’re doing, with different threat levels, and this was toward the top of the list.

I guess if you were really determined, you could find a way to get yourself killed by exposing the power connectors under the panels and shielding and, I don’t know, licking them or something, but this dead human clearly hadn’t.

In order to head off the inevitable “I told you so,” I said to ART, I should have told you to cut the contact. ART said to me, Yes, you should have.

If I was wrong, I’d probably be dead, and that was bad enough. Being stupid and dead would just be that much worse.

Whatever was going on, there was nothing I could do about it now, and that just made me more furious. So I watched five minutes of episode 174 of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Did that work? No, no, it didn’t.

I said, “The Transport doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about, plus it lies a lot, and it’s mean.” A minute, undetectable in the range of human eyesight, fluctuation in the lights told me ART had heard that.

If a bot with a brain the size of a transport could roll its eyes, that was what ART was doing.

ART hadn’t said anything, and that was beginning to worry me. ART likes to give its opinion and I’m not even sure “likes” is the right word there, but basically, ART gives its opinion whether you like it or not.

But the company would access all those recordings and data mine them for anything they could sell. No, they don’t tell people that. Yes, everyone does know it. No, there’s nothing you can do about it.

ART sounded serious, and resigned.

ART paused for 8.3 seconds for no reason I could think of except to make the humans think it wasn’t going to answer the question.

I could have done this a lot more easily by walking around from hatch to hatch and using the comm to contact each transport directly, but it would have been ridiculously obvious that I was doing something, even if the humans couldn’t tell what it was.

“Before your second mother, I had never been an actual member of a team before. Just an…”
Amena finished, “An appliance for a team.”
That was it. “Yes.”

(I know that’s actually not a permanent solution and pretending bad things aren’t happening is not a great survival strategy in the long run, but there was nothing I could do about it now.)

Fuck, fuck everything, fuck this, fuck me especially.

It did seem unlikely that the dead human had been a GrayCris agent, because somebody had killed him. As far as I knew, I was the only one currently on the station looking for GrayCris agents to kill.

(No, I didn’t kill the dead human. If I had, I wouldn’t dump the body in the station mall, for fuck’s sake.)

There was a huge difference between knowing something happened and seeing the reality of it.

“Thank you,” she said. It was like she could see me through my visor, which was a terrifying enough thought that my performance reliability dropped 3 percent.

The video effects were smoother and more polished than anything I could have done and that just made me more furious. This was a vid conference link for humans trying to figure out how screwed they were, not a professional newsfeed production.

As long as I didn’t have to walk into a deployment center filled with SecUnits and the human techs who built and disassembled us, my risk assessment module thought everything was great. (I know, it worries me when I say that, too.)

If you had to take care of humans, it was better to take care of small soft ones who were nice to you and thought you were great because you kept preventing them from being murdered.

Possibly I should just stop complaining like a human and get on with it.